New Year Blues

 “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”

– Benjamin Franklin

I enjoy the December holidays with their festive meals, gifts, and occasions to gather with friends and family; but I don’t care much for the far more sobering New Year celebration. Aside from cutting short the yuletide celebrations (those “12 Days of Christmas” that supposedly last until Epiphany), it heaps upon us even more obligations – to reflect on our accomplishments and advancements of the past year, to set goals for ourselves in the new one, to prepare for the austerity, culling, and organizing of the severe winter months – all onerous propositions after such extravagant indulgences of the holidays.

Summer Reading

 “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

– Ray Bradbury

My son started school last week. For one of his first English assignments he had to endure the obligatory “write about what you did last summer” exercise. Most of his summer consisted of sitting around playing Roblox, but he mentioned most of our various excursions (about which I recently blogged). Summer reading was, alas, conspicuously absent. His electronic-media-dominated generation rarely pays attention to books, preferring to stick their faces in screens all day long. That said, my son surprised me on a last-day-of-summer trip to the regional used bookstore, where he was particularly keen on getting a book he’d noticed on a previous visit: Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre. It gave me a small glimmer of hope that his generation won’t completely forget about books.

Auld Lang Syne 2019

          Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,

          and never thought upon;

          The flames of Love extinguished,

          and fully past and gone:

          Is thy sweet Heart now grown so cold,

          that loving Breast of thine;

          That thou canst never once reflect

          On old long syne.

At this time of year we naturally look back on the past months and even the past years at what has occurred in our lives and the world, at our gains and losses. We particularly remember what no longer exists among us beyond memories, to enable the spirits of these things to live on by various acts of commemoration.

Humans forge their own significance to their individual lives, their families, their communities, and even larger entities. Our perceptions and meanings form our realities; this affects the scope of our commemorations of things past. For some their awareness reaches only a little beyond the mass media’s tedious reflections at this time of year, beginning even before the yuletide holidays with constant lists of those who passed in the last year or, worse yet, annoyingly ubiquitous “Top 10 of the Decade” lists for every subject imaginable. The flood of such easy content can overwhelm us, distracting us from more pressing news and dire action.

Community & the Allure of the OSR

I’ve been exploring various games in the Old School Renaissance movement (OSR) for their varied interpretations of the core material, interesting settings, and overall nostalgic connection to the roleplaying games of my youth. Along the way I’ve realized something beyond the game mechanics and settings: by working with a game engine based on Dungeons & Dragons, the original and most popular fantasy roleplaying game, OSR designers tap into a vast community of fans (and potential customers) who share that familiar experience.

I’ve seen various arguments about what defines an OSR game, how the OSR emerged from the Open Game License (OGL) of the 2000s, and, of course, which OSR games are the most popular, true to the originals, and innovative in their own right. I certainly don’t wish to delve into those issues here (if at all); but the OSR capitalizes on a confluence of familiarity – for both the designer and audience – with not simply a core game system but a shared gaming experience through some iteration of D&D.